I am trying to create a form, that will accept 3 values.

The path. $PATH (including / etc characters)
The Searched Value ($VALUE)
the new Value ($NEW_VALUE)

It should go recursively into all files in the entered path and do a search and replace.

I believe we can do a shell script with SED. Though how do we do it recursively and only for the entered path?
Also, what needs to be done for it to run via php and a html form?

Is it possible to have some kind of a report which says, ok, this many entries found and replaced?

Is this the right way to start?

"sed -e 's|old string|new/better string|g'

thanks!
tc

You could probably do the whole thing in PHP using preg_replace(). You can use find to return a list of suitable file names from a given start point
Perl is another program to consider using as that makes changing files in situ a breeze
will make the changes to the files, preserving the originals with a .bak suffix.

There's More Than One Way To Do It!

how i do it:
create a shell script to do what you want.
run it from a CGI form.

I have a simple template CGI that will run
any shell command. So now i just plug a differet shell script
in for anything that crops up. (as long as it's not too interactive)

also, if you pass parameters, do them like:
command var=value var2=this
then you can read them in, pass them to 'eval'
and hey presto, instant ready variables.